43 h. ago No Straight Road Takes You There by Rebecca Solnit review – an activist’s antidote to despair

Hope is no casual platitude in this inspiring collection of essays; it’s the realistic mindset with which to approach challengesAccording to Rebecca Solnit, a lot of us are suffering from something called moral injury. She describes this as the “deep sense of wrongness” that can infiltrate our lives when we realise we are complicit in something seriously bad.The first time I experienced this in relation to climate change, I was changing my baby’s nappy soon after one of the worst Australian wildfire seasons on record in 2020. The nappy featured a smiling cartoon koala on the front. I immediately recalled the scene of a singed, parched koala being fed water from a plastic bottle by a human as it fled the inferno. A disposable nappy takes up to 500 years to decompose. I felt disgust and despair at the degree of consumption, waste and exploitation that even a modest lifestyle in a high-income country seems to entail. Continue reading...

Politics

66 h. ago Manchester United suffer but Ruben Amorim could cure ailing psyche

Manager’s emotional intelligence needed for painful therapy process regardless of Europa League final result “It will change my life; it will not change me,” Ruben Amorim told the BBC not long after becoming Manchester United manager, his underpinning sentiment – that self-worth comes from within – a cornerstone of therapeutic thinking. Sure enough, as the interview continued, he unabashedly raised his own therapy, in the process showing disarming candour, a man supremely comfortable in his own head.Effective treatment requires going backwards to go forwards and it is easy to chortle that under Amorim, United have done just that. As they prepare for a final we could characterise as two bald men fighting over a wig, there may be a very specific regression taking place: back to good old 1990, when United finished 13th in the league and then beat an even worse team to win a cup, changing everything in the process. Continue reading...

Politics

6 d. ago I revisited my childhood holiday town — so has it changed for better or worse?

North Wales had classic bucket and spade holiday appeal in the 1990s. As multi-generation holidays are trending, Lydia Swinscoe returns to see if it delivers for grown-up family staycations too

Politics

6 d. ago I revisited my childhood holiday town in North Wales — so has it changed for better or worse?

North Wales had classic bucket and spade holiday appeal in the 1990s. As multi-generation holidays are trending, Lydia Swinscoe returns to see if it delivers for grown-up family staycations too

Politics

1 week ago CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Change Your Mind, Change Your Life: The BBC's dire new therapy series is worse than rubbish

Apparently, it's completely fine to tell someone who is paralysed by anxiety to switch to 'automatic pilot' and go through life like 'a little robot'.

Politics

1 week ago Abbey Clancy 'thought Peter Crouch was dead' after spotting night

Abbey Clancy was left fearing the worst for her husband Peter Crouch after noticing a change in the middle of the night - but the former England striker found her reaction amusing

Events

2 w. ago Talk of replacing Kemi Badenoch is a distraction from the Tory party’s real problems

Editorial: Yet another change of leader would only make the Conservative Party’s predicament worse

Politics

3 w. ago Five years on: how Covid changed sport for better and for worse

With the pandemic in the rearview mirror it was clearly a boost for Fifa and Saudi Arabia but harmed grassroots sport and player welfareSound the trumpets, beat the drum, let loose the buttock-rockets of hope. One of the strangest and most unsatisfying things about the Covid-19 pandemic, among a great many deeply strange and unsatisfying things, is that it never actually had a shared end date or ceremonial send-off.Jarringly so, because this was a period in the national life built around a rigid roster of public events. The numerical rules. The weekly banging of pots in honour of people you secretly consider to be serfs. Such unlikely figures as health secretary Matt Hancock appearing in public every day in order to say inauthentic-sounding things about public health, all the while resembling the doomed subcommander of an imperial space galleon who keeps announcing that he’s got the situation under control sir, just as the bridge behind him is cleaved in two and he’s sucked out into...

Politics

3 w. ago Starbucks says cutting shop staff in favour of automation has failed

Chief executive Brian Nicoll vows to ‘fundamentally change’ strategy in face of worse-than-expected resultsStarbucks is planning to hire more baristas, get them to work more hours at its coffee shops and roll back its embrace of automation, as the company’s new leadership battles to turn the chain around.Brian Niccol, who joined Starbucks as chief executive last September, has vowed to “fundamentally change” the company’s strategy in order to win back customers. Continue reading...

Events

3 w. ago The North Wales seaside town with a secret beach tourists don’t know about

One visitor described it as a 'hidden gem' where you can escape the crowds

Society